Dr. Diana Venkman

On Montuesday while I was taking twenty-three thousand messages off the answering machine, I was so bored - Abuse, neglect ,malpractice, short staffing, bad food, no hot water - yada, yada, yada, They killed Mama!, They Have No Food In The Building!, Rats In The Halls!. Whatever, you know? I’ve heard it all before.

And then, towards the end of this litany of misery ...My house is haunted and I need your help

Say what?

My House Is Haunted And I Need Your Help Oh. That's different

The other complaints, I can’t deal with, but a haunting? Hauntings I can deal with. So I went online and looked up Para-Normal research in North Carolina and got hits. I did a little leg work and found one that included a phone number. I like phone numbers, they give the allusion of somewhere to call and that there will be someone there to answer. It lends gravitas to a group that claims to be real life ghost busters, I mean if they can afford a phone number and web hosting, they must be legit. Right?

Phone number in hand I called back Mr. Haunted. He had a crazy message on his machine, but he wasn’t calling from a mental hospital. I left a message and hours later, he called back. We had a routine conversation, as routine a conversation as you can when you are talking about ghosts with someone who claims to be being harassed by them. He mentioned that all of this was giving him a “nervous breakdown”, I took this opportunity to tell him if he needed mental health care that he should call his local Department of Social Services and they could help him with that, he said he was all ready seeing a “Lady doctor” and he had seen her three times and she was a good doctor. Confident his fragile mental health was in good hands, I gave him the number and felt good about helping this poor guy. Problem solved, I told the Social Worker about it and we laughed.

Well. He called me back. He said he had been calling the number all morning and they hadn’t answered. I asked how many times he called, he said “about 30", I told him to stop calling them and give it a rest. Perhaps they weren’t set up for that kind of call volume, maybe the machine was full, maybe they just weren’t home. I told him to call them later.

Wednesday afternoon he called me again. The people were simply not there, he said. He needed a new number, he really, really needed help he said, the ghosts were there all the time. He would go to bed by himself and when he woke up there were all over the bed, walking around his house. I asked him when this started and he said “about a year ago, after my wife died”.

I asked him if he was sure these were ghosts, that somehow these weren’t real people in his house. He said they were most certainly ghosts. His hand went right though them when he tried to touch them and the disappeared when he spoke with them. I asked if he had told them forcefully to go away. He said he had.

I was running out of ghost talk. I led with questions about cold spots and unexplained noises or missing articles. No, not really he said, but his phones had stopped working last week. I asked if he blamed the ghosts for this, he said yes. He told me about the big groups of people, I asked what they were wearing, he said “old looking clothes”. I said I would find him a different set of ghost hunters.

I found another one, but without a phone number, they were all email. I still had Mr. Haunted on the phone and he said he doesn’t have email. I told him that I would fill out the questionnaire for him and send it in. This also gave me the opportunity to get his name and address and phone number. Important information to have. I was worried about this person.

I suspect that after the death of his wife he became very lonely and depressed I think he created these images to make him feel less alone. I think they are people from his past and they comforted him and made him feel less alone, they are dressed in “old clothes” because that is what they were wearing in the photographs he is remembering them from. That “lady doctor” he spoke of possibly gave him some meds for depression and they are now causing him to hallucinate .

I emailed the ghost busters and told Mr. Haunted to wait to hear from them. We hung up. Then I went back to the Social Worker.

She asked if I had called APS (Adult Protective Services), I said I hadn’t thought of that. She said call them and tell them about Mr. Haunted, he may need more help then ghost busting. I called the county and spoke with someone and I told them all I knew about Mr. Haunted and his dead wife and the ghosts and filed a report. Mr. Haunted is going to be getting visitors less spectral, but maybe more frightening.